Wednesday, 29 October 2014

Yet more novel ideas

November is nearly upon us, that month when the world’s
population of fictional characters is incremented by at least a million as
aspiring writers across the globe sharpen their pencils and set to work on
dragging the novel inside them kicking and screaming onto the empty page. If you don’t take part each year in National
Novel Writing Month – or NaNoWriMo, as we veterans like to call it – then you
don’t know what you’re missing. What
else, after all, is there to do in this muddy, overcast month; this dour,
humourless security officer of a month who beckons you in from the warm oranges
of October only to keep you waiting in cold, windy dampness for what seems like
an eternity before finally unhooking the rope which admits entrance to the
delights of December? In the UK, we try
to liven up this bleak collection of days with bonfire night, supposedly once a
celebration of a terrorist’s failure to blow up the Houses of Parliament, but
possibly actually just an excuse to remember what being warm felt like. In the US, the artificial bubble of enforced
gratitude generated for Thanksgiving collapses so spectacularly on the day
after that news coverage of the blood lust of Black Friday has now become
important entertainment viewing the rest of the world over. Anything to make the month pass more quickly.

But November novel-writers are oblivious to all of
this. Enshrined in their little cocoons
of their very own make-believe, the only possible relevance of happenings in
the real world to them are if these can offer any potential plot devices. Time passes all too quickly when you’re
trying to knock out 50,000 words in a mere thirty days, though this is not to
suggest that there won’t be moments when you wish no-one had ever invented the
concept of the novel or writing or language even itself, and that an impromptu
world war would at least have the silver lining that it might spare you from
having to think about any of these things ever again.

For the past couple of years in AVENUE magazine I’ve
entertained myself (and, possibly, one or two readers) in November with a
collection of potential storylines for Second Life inspired novels, that
emerging genre of fiction across the surface of which I’ve vainly scratched
away for the past eight years. For my
own amusement as much as anyone else’s, therefore, I humbly present yet another.

Lindependence Day. The continent of Nautilus decides it wants
independence from the rest of Second Life and manages to convince Linden to
hold a referendum of its citzens. The
campaign is ferocious. All attempts by
the board of governors to persuade Nautileans to vote ‘no’ only seem to
increase the percentage saying to the pollsters they’ll vote ‘yes’ – even Ebbe
Altberg’s surprisingly emotional plea not to vote yes just because it
represents a possibility to “kick the effing Lindens” has Yes campaign leader
Nigelex Salmage claiming that the No campaign is falling apart. In the end, even Philip Rosedale is wheeled
out to make the case for ‘Better Together’.
Salmage is unperturbed; speaking with absolutely no authority
whatsoever, he claims that an independent Nautilus would keep the Linden as its
currency and that residents will still be able to access Torley Linden videos. In the end, the reality of independence is
brought home to the majority when several high-profile mesh creators start
talking about relocating their skin factories to Zindra.

Project Really
Interesting. Comedy. A bunch of high-school nerds create
the perfect female avatar and she comes to life in the real world thanks to a
keyboard spillage during a thunder storm of something cutting edge (let’s say a
memristor-graphene suspension) that one of the gang swiped during a school trip
to the local science genius’s laboratories.
It turns out that the very same genius has been secretly plotting to
take over the world and our heroes manage to put a stop to his plans through a
sequence of contrived events that mostly require one or all of them to be naked
accidentally. A zany caper from start to
finish; if this were a movie you could expect it to be advertised on buses
during a holiday season.

The Amazing Second
Life into Darkness. In a
not-too-distant future, the successor to SL is launched by Linden. Marketed as a reboot rather than a sequel,
‘Amazing Second Life’ features planets rather than continents and sims, with
travel between worlds a lengthy, complicated and expensive affair. Whilst your initial rez point is officially
described as random, it soon becomes clear that Linden are employing a formula
which the company eventually fesses up to being derived from your Google search
habits, your Amazon spending pattern and the number of times you’ve shared
pictures of Grumpy Cat on Facebook.
Group identity being what it is, however, the revelation comes too late
to prevent entrenched identities from forming and, within barely a year of the new
metaverse’s release, two nearby planets go to war over a mesh body IP issue. It is the first in a decade-long series of
conflicts which historians later refer to as The First Virtual War. Property is destroyed by missiles which
initiate a virus chain reaction when detonated.
The real life media don’t know quite what to make of this, and the novel
follows a young intern reporter as she travels around Earth to meet individually
in real life the refugees from a virtual planet that’s been almost totally
ravaged by the Primfluenza Virus. Her
journey takes her from a French Chateaux to a New York apartment to a bedsit in
a Hillingdon council estate. “It was
terrible,” one refugee – a member of the German aristocracy – tells her. “We were running around in panic because one
moment everything was normal and the next it’s all vapourising before our eyes. All gone, just like that. All gone.
Everything.” She then orders her
butler to bring more tea and weeps silently for several seconds, telling our
bemused protagonist, “You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what it’s like.”

The Time Traveller’s
Virtual Partner. Within hours of meeting
and falling in love in the metaverse, Wigander Sansom and Dostree Chan are
astonished to find out that they’re communicating from different time
periods. Twenty-two-year-old Wigander is
a full quarter-century ahead of the thirty-year-old Dostree’s 2018. In 2043, it turns out, people have become
nostalgic for the good old days of SL and the Ruth look is very fashionable
amongst teenagers. One of many self-proclaimed
‘retronauts’, Wigander was spending his time exploring the thousands of abandoned
regions (preserved for posterity by Google as a tax-deductible expense) when he
came across ‘Moonstand’, a sim of space-themed fairground rides which –
unbeknownst to him – runs on a server which utilises experimental memory chips
made from a memristor-graphene composite.
At first, the love-struck pair declare this barrier to the possibility
of physical union as a meaningless triviality and rejoice in the universe
finding a way to bring them together; a few days later, however, Dostree asks
casually if Wigander can research 2018’s winning lottery numbers for her. A month passes and Dostree becomes a
millionaire many times over, but each meeting she has with Wigander sees his
recollection of their previous encounters more and more degraded. Throwing caution to the wind, she buys one last
winning ticket, but when she logs in to celebrate with her love, Wigander is
no-where to be found. The reader is then
told he was the son of the original winner of that final ticket, an unemployed writer
who kept secret his fortune from his family by claiming all his money was from
the sale of his Kindle novels. Without
that lottery win, he doesn’t feel able to ask for the hand in marriage of his
girlfriend and Wigander is never born. Dostree,
of course, knows none of this; just when you think it can’t get any more heart-breaking,
the reader is told how she looks sadly through her apartment window at the statue
of ‘The Railwayman’, a newly erected tribute to her town’s local history and
the very same statue which – not a hundred pages earlier – Wigander also was
noted to look at through his window.
Yes, Wigander was Dostree’s son.

Red Prim Rising. The Russians launch their own metaverse, Вторая жизнь созданных шахт (Second Life of Crafted
Mines). Derided by western governments,
it becomes an overnight internet sensation and populated by millions of disaffected
Americans and Europeans. Everyone
becomes friends and world peace breaks out.
Well, I can dream.